Fire Island Beach House Stands 10 Feet Above Sand on Deep Timber Posts

A beach house on Fire Island, New York, sits 10 feet above the sand.

Coughlin Scheel Architects has completed the Surf Road House outside the town of Ocean Beach. The cedar-clad home was reported by Dezeen on 28 September 2026.

The entire house is lifted three metres into the air on wood pilings. Pilings are posts driven into the ground to carry a building above floodwater. Here they respond to flooding and environmental concerns on an exposed coastal plot.

The posts run deep. They extend up to 35 feet, or 10.6 metres, below grade, which means below ground level. That depth anchors the house in unstable sand.

The location explains the engineering. The plot sits within a designated Coastal Erosion Hazard Area. That is a planning zone where the shifting shoreline controls how and where building can happen.

The new house replaces an earlier home from the 1950s. That building was razed to make way for the project.

Its faces are wrapped in cedar siding, or timber boards fixed to the outer walls. The colouring alludes to dunes and driftwood. Think weathered greys and pale browns that sit easily against sand and sky.

On its own site, the practice describes the shape as a set of offset rectangular frames, one volume slipped against the next Coughlin Scheel. A trellis crosses part of the facade. A trellis is an open lattice that lets light through, and here it casts shadows that move across the timber during the day and lift the texture of the wall.

The studio also says the house merges with the dunes to create a harmonious transition between land, sea and sky. That is the architects' own description of the intent.

What makes this stand out is what is missing. There is no solid base. There is open air beneath the floor. The house reads light on its tall legs, with the beach landscape left to move around it.

For anyone arriving for a weekend, this means the first sight is posts rather than walls. You look under the house before you look in.

That height also lifts everyday life. Bedrooms and living spaces sit up in the light and the wind, while the ground below is left open to sand, water and weather.